Love's Language

By Kaiama L. Glover

Published: November 12, 2006

Not much happens in Leila Aboulela's lyrical first novel -- because almost everything has already happened. The past asserts its presence in every moment and every exchange. Even the romance at the center of the narrative is haunted, inseparable from the tragic love story that preceded it. Indeed, ''The Translator'' is rooted in this tragedy -- fixed on a beloved corpse that, while part of the past, remains acutely present in the lives of the central characters. Indeed, time echoes and repeats throughout the book, refusing the straight line, suspending us somewhere between heartbreak and hope.

''The Translator'' is a sensitive portrayal of love and faith. Sammar, a Sudanese widow, lives in Scotland and works as an Arabic translator at a university in Aberdeen. Having lost her much-loved husband in a car accident, Sammar has completely abandoned herself to grief. She has spent the four years since his death almost entirely withdrawn from the world, her only comfort the five azan (daily calls to prayer) that gently remind her ''only Allah is eternal.'' It is not until she begins working for Rae, an agnostic Scottish Islamic scholar, that Sammar begins to imagine a happier ending to her story, boldly allowing herself to love this man and to be loved by him, despite her unsettling doubts about his potential for faith.

One of the most moving elements of the novel is Aboulela's judgment-free account of this love. Sammar's devotion to Islam and to Rae is touching in its certainty and uncompromising in its fierceness. At first, her love for Allah is the only thing stronger than her sorrow. It grants her access to ''something deeper than happiness, all the splinters inside her coming together.'' But then her conversations with Rae offer her another means of escaping her tragedy: ''His words were in her mind now, floating, not evaporating away. At night she dreamt no longer of the past but of the rain and gray colors of his city. She dreamt of the present.'' For Sammar, both her communion with the divine and her feelings for Rae offer freedom, so she is blindsided when the two come into conflict.

Of course, conflict is inevitable in a novel set in Scotland and Sudan that explores desire in the context of profound religious devotion. And in some ways Aboulela passes too lightly over the obstacles posed by this tension. But while her forays into politics and Western media manipulation of Muslim extremism can seem facile, she more than compensates with beautiful passages on Islam's essential purity and poetry. Aboulela has a talent for expressing the simple wonders of unbroken faith. Just as deftly, she uncovers the intricacies of how such faith can be challenged -- suddenly, subtly.

Sammar and Rae's story is one of division and difference, and of those miraculous places of intersection like love. For both characters, love means having someone to tell their stories to, without fear. It means effacing the boundaries of language, of nation, of religion -- all no more than ''data that fills forms.'' In other words, love translates. It can be that simple, Aboulela suggests. And by the end of this novel, she almost has you believing it.